Let me start by thanking Howard for inviting me to participate this month as a guest blogger. This spring, I talked about the challenges facing legal education as part of two campus visits as a dean candidate. For what it’s worth, I wanted to share a redacted version of my comments. They point to what I see as generic challenges to the law school business model.
Mostly I wanted to discern core values that are necessarily pitted against each other in a law school: (i) the long-run interests of students; (ii) the law school’s corporate interests; (iii) the University’s institutional interests; and (iv) the claims of external constituencies. The dean’s role is to manage these trade-offs.
My second goal was to begin responding to some of the negative claims made of late about legal education. I think that we have been too bashful in responding to criticisms.
This was my first time doing this, so I’m very interested in any thoughts you might have about any aspect of these issues, on- or off-line.
Cheers.
Posted by Jose Gabilondo on March 4, 2016 at 01:06 PM